The first real day of E3 come to a close with less E3 news than the days that weren’t technically part of E3. Weird.

Here’s are some of the fun things discovered today:

A new Duck Hunt?!

A sequel I honestly never thought I’d see is playable at E3. The Wii will have a new gun peripheral and what is surely gaming history’s most played gun game appears to be having another go at it. Is this going to be a full on Wii game or is this just a demo so that they can showcase the gun at E3? I’m not going to speculate an answer to that! IGN gives us an impression of the game as well as a look at the new “light gun” shell for the Wii controller. It’s unknown how exactly the “light gun” will work or even whether or not it will use light (if it does not it will probably not be refered to as a light gun much longer…”. Since the original Nintendo Zapper is incompatible on some modern televisions (such as my LCD projection TV) this may finally give us unfortunate souls who tragically only have access to high end televisions the oppurtunity to shoot some ducks again.

New Super Smash Bros. Brawl characters announced

New characters for the Wii Super Smash Bros. game have been reported by Kotaku. New characters include Solid Snake, Nintendogs, Metaknight, Pit, Zero Suit Samus and Wario. I don’t even know who two of those are! I certainly hope players can move their Wii-mote in a belly rubbing motion to incapacitate their Nintendog opponents… though apparently we will be using the classic GameCube controllers on this one.

Earthworm Jim Returns!

From the soil did crawl an interesting announcement from Atari today. We’ll be seeing another Earthworm Jim game, this time on the PSP. Check out IGN for more on this.

An innovative X-Box game?

A game more attypical for it’s system than Kameo will be released on the X-Box! You guess it! It’s a… piniata game… WHAT? Yeah so I guess you just whack a piniata with a bat, right? No. It’s a piniata farm simulation game. Wasn’t that a skit on the short lived John Leguizamo vehicle “House of Buggin“? Well I’m pretty sure it was but still this game is coming. Check out this article at Kotaku for more info and a sweet looking screenshot.

TNI is reporting that Majestic Studios will be offering an exclusive for the San Diego Comic Con. The exclusive will be a Battle Damaged Cylon from the new incarnation of Battlestar Galactica. The figure will not be just a repaint of upcoming line they will be offering but instead featuring a whole new head sculpt. Includes figure, interchangable arms so regular arms can be switched for the turret gun arms, stand and base featuring head and parts of another fallen Cylon. Articulation includes shoulders, elbows, wrists, waist, hips, and knees. These figures will be extremely limited to 400 pieces, 100 of which will be available on preview night with the rest available at the normal start of the convention and none will be held back. Figures are on a first come first serve basis.

Scott Kurtz is best known for PvP, but I’ve quite enjoyed his new side project, co written with Aaron Williams..

“Truth, Justin, and the American Way” is a new hero comic with deep, deep roots in classics like Spider-Man and TV shows like Family Ties. Sound weird? It kind of is.

Justin is the ‘average guy’ who skips out of work early to help plan his wedding with his fiance and then go on to his bachelor party.  It gets kinda messed up when some weirdo Russian switches Justin’s change of clothes with an alien supersuit.  Suddenly he can lift an entire keg of beer with one hand!
The entire concept front to back seems to be molded toward being an 80s sitcom more than anything else. And since thats where his roots are, thats just fine. The book has jokes, and its pretty funny. Its actually really refreshing if you’re like me and rarely pick up a comic that doesn’t feature one epic ‘serious’ struggle after another. I gotta browse the indie-rack more often.

The real star of this book is the pen of Guiseppe Ferrario, who turns in honestly some of the most impressive comic art I’ve seen in years.  Every character is oozing with life and personality, and though the images are as static as any comic page, its not too hard to imagine the entire affair being animated.  I’ll likely be buying every book this guy pencils from now on.
The books been out for 2 weeks, but I read on Kurtz blog that the first printing has sold out, so if your comic shop doesn’t have any left, you’re out of luck until they do a second run. Luckily, you can read the entire book cover to cover online for free!  I can’t wait to see more, myself.

The one time GameCube exclusive is being sent to another platform.
Resident Evil 4 will be released to Windows PCs in May courtesy of Ubisoft. The game appears to be a port of the generously expanded PS2 version, with the “Seperate Ways” campaign, extra costumes, and more weapons.
While its easy to make the arguement that the PS2 port of RE4 didn’t look quite as good as the GameCube original, I look forward to seeing what the game looks like on a high-end PC. Ubisoft has done some really graphically amazing games the last couple years, so I hope there are some enhancements and this isn’t just a straight port.
But if it is a straight port and this is your first chance to play this game: get off your butt and do it. Its as good as everyone says it is.

Nintendo has started to put DS download stations in stores everywhere. Basically you just walk into a store that has one, turn on your DS and use the built in download option to download demos of games just like you would from your friend’s DS.

To find out if there’s one near you check out this store locator which lets you find all locations within 50 miles. Here in Canada it would seem that EB has cornered the market though in the US they seem to be primarily at Best Buys.

I dropped by my local EB and tried it out. Apparently the station had been there for 3 weeks which I found pretty annoying considering I’ve been to EBs a bunch of times since then without noticing. My DS saw the station as “volume 1” insinuating there would naturally be more demos to come as new games neared release. I spoke with a friendly EB employee who explained that it was just a DS sitting there with a cartridge that provided this functionality. He said their Nintendo rep would eventually come by to switch the cartridge when new demos are available. A pretty simple but engenious gimmick.

Nintendo’s customer service FAQ boasts that these stations will work within 65 feet of the source. The guy at EB said they kept it behind the cash and it worked at about a 15 foot raduis from there. Some pretty conflicting opinions there. I didn’t try to log on from the parking lot but I’d be more inclined to believe the 15 feet story as it’s just a DS sitting there. When I’d go to Best Buy to set up the display DS with the chat and hide behind the aisles sending pictures of penises to it with my DS while looking for people’s reaction I noticed that the range was in the wearabouts of 15 feet. Maybe a bit more but not 65 to be sure.

These games will stay on your DS as long as you can keep it powered. This means no turning it off and no switching to another game you’ve got in there without losing your download. Luckily it will still retain the game in sleep mode so, as long as you don’t leave it unplugged for days at a time, you should have no real problem keeping a game for long periods with a little common sense.

So go and steal games as sales people look at you hoping you’ll actually buy something for a change.

Everyone’s favorite japanese animation house has released a trailer for their next movie.
The Legend Of Earthsea
Its a film based on the fantasy series by Ursula K. Le Guin. Theres not a lick of english in the trailer, but you can at least watch it. Probably be another year before we see it in the states.

The first revealed Nintendo Revolution title Red Steel has its official site up. Not that there is anything there. Even with a UbiSoft login in, clicking past the splash page just redirects you to their main site.
Some real news has trickled out though:

“Despite the influences and the apparent change in opinion towards more mature content by Nintendo, TVG has learnt that the game will not feature gratuitous violence and is unlikely to feature blood as a result.”

Thats from Totalvideogames via 4CR.
Should we even get worked up about no blood? I don’t think so. Anyone play Black? Fantastic gunplay, lots of explosions, guys dying every 3 or 4 seconds the entire legnth of the game, and not a DROP of blood. Most critics didn’t mention this because it was a lot less important than the game itself, which i hope Red Steel will be as well.

All the info from this month’s GameInformer after the jump
[Read the rest of this entry…]

From the 7th to the 15th to the 21st
Its only another week, but New Super Mario Brothers is something we’ve waited for very patiently and we can wait a little longer. Not like there isn’t a stack of unplayed and incomplete games here at the Shipley compound…

thx mike!

Edit: OMG, Nintendo has update their site and it says May 15 again.